Ravi Abuvala, Business Coach, Consultant, & Founder, Scaling with Systems: From Law School Dropout to Waiter to Profitable Entrepreneur

Ravi Abuvala is a law school dropout who pivoted and made his name as a profitable entrepreneur. He’s the founder of Scaling with Systems, which helps B2B businesses scale to seven figures with systems, processes, and virtual assistants. He’s been featured by ABC News, Inc., Yahoo! Finance, and more. 

Ravi’s Original Story: From Law School Dropout to Waiter to Profitable Entrepreneur

My whole life, I was going to be a lawyer. That was my number one priority. In order to get into law school, you have to take the law school admission test – and you need to score highly on it if you want to get into a good law school.

I took a year off after graduating college and was about to start studying for this test when I got a call from my dad. He told me he had been diagnosed with Stage IV lung cancer. It threw me for a loop. I ended up packing all my stuff and moving from Florida to Atlanta, GA, to be closer to my dad. For a whole year, I would wake up at 4 a.m., work out until 5, and then from 5 a.m. to 8 a.m. I would be studying for the law school admission test. Then, from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., I would go to chemo and radiation with my dad. When I got home, I would study until midnight. This happened five days a week.

Luckily, my dad has been in remission for two years. What this experience opened up for me is how fragile life really is, but also how I was going through the motions and going down a route someone else wanted for me. What cemented my course change was a great book I read, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck. After that, and after my dad’s cancer, I couldn’t stay with the lawyer thing, though I did still take the lawyer admission test, scored in the top 10% nationwide, and got into my dream schools.

Instead I said, you know what? I’m going to work at this Italian restaurant down the road while I figure out this entrepreneur thing.

My first order of business: I had to find a role or job where I wasn’t trading time for money. Even if I became one of the top lawyers in the country, I would still be making that trade-off. I didn’t want to do that.

Next, I literally googled “how to make money online.” And, of course, I stumbled across digital marketing. I dove in, but after the first eight months I had no money – $3K, total. Then, I started learning about lead generation, systems, processes, virtual assistants, and having someone do 300-500 pieces of outreach for me daily. As soon as I started doing that, things changed and my calendar started filling.

Here’s why: I had been focusing on the wrong things previously. I was trying to be the best Facebook advertiser, the best website creator, the best social media marketer, but I had no real-life experience. That approach maybe would have worked 50 years ago, but today, we’re hit with so much noise daily, you have to be constantly in front of your audience, generating leads, and getting attention around your name, brand, and company to actually start closing deals and serving those people. So that’s what I did. I started focusing more on setting appointments and taking appointments. Since then, I haven’t had an empty calendar for myself or my sales guys.

That said, it’s not just about generating and closing on leads. Your processes matter for your business, too. If you have a machine running behind the scenes you can set to automate, your whole life will change.

That’s why, in my company, we say we can convert high-figure clients in 7.5 days, from outreach to payday – because we tracked our sales cycle and that’s what our automation does. On the front-end of the machine is your traffic source. For me, that’s doing a podcast interview, sending emails, doing Facebook or YouTube ads, etc. All those traffic sources are pointing to one central location, whether that’s a blog post, a webinar, a video sales letter, etc., where I can collect my lead’s information. When all is said and done, your lead spends somewhere around eight hours with your content, which gently pushes them toward that final step of becoming a client.

This is the machine I have running in my own business, and the machine I use to scale my clients’ businesses to seven figures.

One of my favorite quotes is, “Just because you spent a lot of time making a mistake doesn’t mean you should continue making it.” For me, that was the path of becoming a lawyer and going to law school. As soon as I knew it was wrong, I got off it. I didn’t waste time regretting it. And the rest is history.

Find more from Ravi Abuvala at Scaling with Systems.